James in an absent-minded way put his arm round her, and said he thought ladies ought always to have gentlemen escorts.
“Is that so?” Nellie answered, simpering; and, with the same apparent absence of mind, sidling closer to him, which induced his easy caresses; “well, I must be going along,” she announced, giggling.
“Well, good-by, Miss Sherman,” said the chivalrous James, and gave her a hearty kiss, which made Nellie slap at him with one hand, and say, “Now you stop that!” and go off, still giggling, into the darkness.
Sara Wharton, upstairs by her fire, had dropped her face in her hands, and was saying to herself, “I must trust her more, and believe in her more! Oh, I am sure she tries—poor little Nellie.”
And certainly poor Nellie was not conscious of any lack of trying, so far as the episode with James was concerned. To her, as well as to him, it was very harmless, that kiss in the porch. And really to call such a thing “sin” is to lift it to a level where it does not belong.
But probably Sara Wharton was constitutionally unable to understand that.
The people who try to make silk purses out of inadequate materials rarely can understand it.
IV
The Whartons did not get back until April, and the improvement in Sara’s color, and the clear, glad look in her eyes, showed how much she had needed the change. She was all ready for her brave, happy work for other people. Her very first visit was to Nellie’s aunt. When she climbed up to the top tenement, stopping to open a window on a landing half way up, so that the sweet spring air might turn out the odors of the hall-sink, and of the dirt in the corners and on the stairs, she came into Mrs. Sherman’s room a little breathless, but with a soft rose-color on her cheek.